ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) is a collection of best practices for achieving an IT service management (ITIL is a registered trademark and a registered community trademark of the Office of Government Commerce). The core of the ITIL is service support and service delivery. One type of service support is configuration management. Configuration management is a process of identifying a configuration item (CI), keeping and updating information on the configuration item, and checking and inspecting the configuration item. A configuration item is a resource to be subjected to configuration management. A configuration item includes not only system resources including hardware and software, but also facilities to provide an IT service, documents, such as a rule book, procedures document and configuration diagrams on the management of the IT service, services like maintenance information, processes, and human resources. The framework of the ITIL recommends unitary management using a database called a configuration management database (CMDB) to manage a configuration item. The CMDB is a database for recording a relationship between at least one predetermined attribute of a configuration item and another configuration item. The most important capabilities that are provided by implementing the CMDB are a capability of automatically discovering information on a configuration item (also called discovery or automatic detection) and a capability of automatically updating information on a configuration item (also called tracking). It is important to accurately reflect information on a configuration item in the CMDB.
International Business Machines Corporation provides “Tivoli Change and Configuration Management Database” (hereinafter Tivoli CCMDB) as software to assist construction of a CMDB and to control operations based on the CMDB. In the Tivoli CCMDB, operation management software is implemented to execute discovery and tracking.
The Tivoli CCMDB can identify 300 different configuration items in a distributed network environment, such as a server, a client, an operating system (OS), middleware (Web/AP/DBMS/LDAP, etc.), package software, a management tool, a network device and a storage device, and can automatically discover and update information on individual configuration items, such as information on configuration items of a computer, information on an application which runs on each computer, configuration information of a network attached storage (NAS) or the like connected to each computer, and configuration information of a storage area network (SAN) directly connected to a network. While the method of gathering information on each configuration item differs depending on targets to be managed, a computer system which manages a CMDB regularly accesses the remote interface for management using an SSH (Secure Shell) or the like to read a setting file on the OS or configuration information, or executes a setting acknowledge command. It is therefore unnecessary to introduce an agent program in a configuration item to be managed. Information which is discovered and updated in the above manner is organized to belong to any one of 31 different sections (Computer System, Database, Application, Process), 636 different classes (basic units of data models; belonging to one section or a plurality of sections), 2609 different attributes (attribute information of data; belonging to one class), 7 different interfaces (a group with high use frequency; belonging to one or a plurality of sections), 57 different relationships, and 49 different data types (types of data). Information on the association of each configuration item with another configuration item is given to a GUI display tool, for example, Tivoli Application Dependency Discovery Manager (TADDM). Then, the relationship of each configuration item with another configuration item is visually displayed, using an individual blocks and linkage between the blocks.